This company doing construction work
in Shinjuku Kabuki-cho had a logo that rings a bell!
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Hmmmmm. That hits a little too close to home for me. Iāll have a word with legal and see what they think.
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Does Monzo have the trademark in Japan though?
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This is the website for the company in question: http://www.matsuo-komuten.co.jp/
And according to this page they updated their logo in 2017, after Monzoās logo was created. https://job.rikunabi.com/2019/company/r985600007/
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Before 2016
After 2017
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Wowā¦ whats the saying?
Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery?
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Gosh very Monzo look alike! 
unless Monzo is in the construction industry I think not. Deffo very very suspect 
Man, those thinner diagonal strokes on the MATSUO logo are giving me a headache. Why arenāt they the same width as the downstrokes? 
So that it is sufficiently different, presumably.
I donāt think itās āmaking money work for everyone (except the Japanese)ā! 
More seriously, I think that thereās issues with copyright which means that companies can lose their ownership if they donāt proactively protect itā¦ (Iām half remembering so I might be wrong - and it might not apply to Japan anyway!)
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It doesnāt look like Monzo has anything registered in Japanā¦
https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/bookmark?s=okdq09o00rju3gq6mrjs0amfj8
I am not a lawyer butā¦
As in many countries including the UK, in Japan you are afforded a number of intellectual property rights regarding your creative and commercial works without needing to make any registration. Japan has additional protections such as the unfair competition law.
Defending intellectual property is a routine, necessary part of running a company, and necessary to (among other things) maintain the right to defend said IP. Itās not (apart from actual copyright troll cases) an indication that a company is being unfair or unreasonable.
Iām not going to quote you in full but I do wonder what possessed you to go on this tangent in a topic about a logo. Iām not even convinced that itās accurate, and donāt know what kind of correlation/causation youāre implying, but I donāt really see a need to discuss it here.
FWIW, many Japanese mobile phones supported contactless payments for something like 8 years before Apple/Android Pay existed. Talk of a ācash societyā is not wrong per se, but probably an oversimplification.
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Oh Japan is most certainly a cash based society. If you go there youāll see it, particularly if you go outside of Tokyo.
Ability to pay cashless doesnāt mean that the population do so.
Based on: well, I thought it was common knowledge but also justā¦ being there a lot.
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From my experience with creating brands and launching businesses, I know the following: trademarking is pretty much national in scope without multiple copyright/trademark registrations. Essentially, there is no such thing as international copyright law, there is no such thing.
There is something called the Berne Convention but as far as Iām aware that only covers international scope for artisitc and creative works, not business trademarks, so unless the logo designer registered it as a āaristic workā then this would not be covered. And Iām fairly certain that if he/she did, you wouldnāt be able to use it for commercial business activities.
Iām pretty certain that a logo is covered under intellectual property or indiviual design rights. These are bound on a national scope too. Essentially, you would either have to sign up for Registered Community Design (RCD) which would cover the entirety of the EU, the Hague System which allows entities to register multiple designs to numerous nations at the same time and then other countries would have to have it registered in that country.
If Monzo havenāt gone to the effort of registering in Japan, there is no way the brand is covered under any law that makes it illegal to copy their logo and use it within the confines of that country. It does however mean that if this other company āMatsuoā have registered in Japan, Monzo wonāt be able to OR will need to change the branding for that country.
There are many loopholes however, their legal representatives could easily use a āreasonable mans testā to prove that people would view them both as different entities despite the resemblance. Itās important to know that logo designs are so open to interpretation in a legal perspective that launching legal proceedings could EASILY come and bite you in the rear.
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Hey all,
Iāve removed some posts that were worryingly off-topic so that we can continue to have this discussion.
Thanks.
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